NATIONAL WORKSHOP

National Workshop for Mentors on Online Certification Courses was held at IIT, Madras, Chennaion 15th March, 2014. The workshop was a meeting of mentors regarding Online certification courses under the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning Programme. Prof. Amit Kumar Sharma, Department of Information Technology, Mr. Pradeep Singla, Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering and Mr. C. Ganesh, Department of Mechanical Engineering as mentor from Dronacharya Group of institutions, Greater Noida attended the workshop. Delegates from over hundred institutes and universities attended the event.

The objective of the program was:-

1. To create awareness about the NPTEL portal.

2. To create awareness amongst the mentors about the compiler used for courses for helping the students.

3. Discussion on future plans for learner’s communities.

The program started at 10:00 AM. in Class Room Complex, IIT Madras, Chennai. The program coordinator briefed about the programme structure designed by the IIT Madras, under NPTEL programme for online certification.

An introduction of the Programming, Data Structure & Algorithms certification course was given by Dr. Shankar Balachandran, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering Department at IIT Madras. Dr. Balachandran introduced the course, its contents and duration. The target audience for this course is the undergraduate students of science and engineering colleges. The course will be run over ten weeks with about 2-3 hours of lectures every week.

At the end of each week, the participants are expected to complete the assignment given to them and submit them for grading. These assignments are the programming problems under three categories i.e. easy, moderate or difficult. The easy problems, typically, are repeats from the lecture. The moderate and difficult ones will require in-depth study of the subject. In addition, at the end of each week the learner is expected to answer a set of objective-type assessment questions.

Dr. Balachandran requested not to use Turbo C compiler for programming assignments and stressed upon using an open source gcc compiler to test and execute the problems. He explained some feature of the online compiler used for C Program, different problems that the students may face while programming and also discussed how to solve them.

Dr. Hema A Murthy delivered a presentation on ‘Introduction to the Data Structure and Algorithm’. She discussed the complexity of algorithms and how the data structure would help students in making their projects.

Third speaker, Dr. N. S. Narayanaswamy, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras discussed algorithms and its implementation in easy words. He asserted that the algorithms in every process are the fundamental step towards the solution.

Ms. Usha Nagarajan, Principal, Project Officer, NPTEL, IIT Madras asked mentors to motivate their students for the online course. She answered the query asked by various mentors regarding the online certification program.

The workshop ended with the distribution of Certificate of Participation to the participants.